A number of vehicle manufacturers have attempted to integrate dual automatic climate control systems into their products to provide improved cabin temperature stability and increased comfort to vehicle passengers. Many of these attempts have sought to include solar radiation sensing or detection components for use with automotive air conditioning systems. For example, there have been proposed control systems comprising a plurality of solar radiation or sunload sensors disposed at predetermined portions of the interior of a vehicle cabin, such as front and rear portions of the cabin, in an effort to adequately control the air temperature of the front or rear portion depending upon signals output from the respective sensors. However, these prior efforts often employ a cumbersome increase in the number of parts required, and necessitate a more complex signal processing system. Moreover, the sunload and solar radiation sensors and systems utilized in these prior attempts generally calculate an overall resultant sunload or solar radiation value based upon input from the respective sensors. This resultant value then serves as the basis for implementing temperature changes by the climate control unit. Thus, the systems utilized in these prior efforts generally operate on an overall vehicle cabin level in that the climate control unit responds by effectuating temperature changes to the entire vehicle cabin.
These type of sensors do not fully respond to the particular sunload levels which reach specific localized portions of the vehicle interior. For example, since temperature changes are adjusted on an overall level with respect to the vehicle cabin, the previous systems do not provide any sort of compensation for differing localized sunloads reaching the vehicle interior, such as the driver and passenger sides of a conventional automotive vehicle. Hence, using the presently available systems, a driver and/or passenger of a vehicle are deprived of individualized automatic climate control in response to particular sunloads which reach their respective localized portions of the vehicle interior.